Identifying and Classifying Benefits of Integrated Healthcare Systems Using an Actor-Oriented Approach

Abstract

The demands of health system are set to evolve based on patients needs and thus, healthcare managers and clinicians require decision making tools that will support them in providing better services to patients. Currently, the non-integrated nature of healthcare Information Systems (IS) is strongly associated with both a reduction in the outcome of care as well as the many medical errors that occur. Recent reports show that around 23,360 people per annum die in UK due to problems related to the medical errors and mainly caused by the nonintegrated nature of the healthcare information systems. Development of an integrated IT infrastructure across the healthcare sector will result in enhanced services provided to all actors and will protect and improve human lives. During the last years, much emphasis has been given on Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technology to bridge together disparate and autonomous systems. EAI is underutilised in the healthcare sector, with many studies showing that resistance to change and lack of awareness are among the main reasons associated with this phenomenon. Although the benefits of EAI are well analysed in literature, there is a need to understand and explain these benefits in the area of healthcare. This is of high importance since it will be easier to address the resistance to change and speed up the adoption of EAI. This paper proposes an actor-oriented approach to identify, analyse and classify benefits associated with the application of EAI in healthcare. The authors introduce a novel taxonomy to classify the EAI benefits and combine the proposed actor-oriented approach with an existing classification for EAI benefits. In doing so, they enhance the level of analysis and allow researchers and managers to better realise the benefits derived from the use of EAI in healthcare.